Peter Tupper

Black people in fetish video porn

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Feb 042011
 

The Well Versed has a too-short interview with Alexander DeVoe, who talks about the history of black people in fetish video porn, on both sides of the camera:

AD: When I first started [directing], people didn’t understand it. When they watched it, they never would’ve guessed it was a black guy producing it; it was all this weird shit, tying people up, gagging them, crazy costumes and dungeons. I wanted to present something that was visually appealing.

TWV: So you’ve moved more towards fetish content?

AD: I look at it as another level to present people of color in.

TWV: Porn is still taboo in the black community, but we know a lot of black people are watching. When you got into the bondage stuff, was it difficult to introduce that?

AD: It was in the beginning. People thought, “This dude, DeVoe is crazy.” There’s a vocal minority that watches this. This is my style, once people got used to the brand, they were feeling it because I was giving them a different look. Everybody else was doing the booty shaking—and I do that because you’ve got to hit every niche. If you look at things in terms of business, everybody might not be feeling it, but there’s an audience. I never want to be compartmentalized or produced things that are stereotypical.

TWV: Was there a process of educating people on the fetish content?

AD: The owner of West Coast [Productions] gave me free reign to do what I wanted, so I was doing shit that was way out: Putting girls in wings and resurrecting dead folks. I was giving people a lot to look at. People were so used to popping in a VHS and watching people shake their booty and have sex. I tried to keep everything really complex, but I understand that you only had a certain amount of time before people hit fast forward.

I think people in any business, including porn, develop their own received wisdom about what their customers want. It does take a rare individual to go against the grain and take a risk, by having POCs in a fetish or BDSM scene, and to address POCs as an audience when the assumption is that the audience is white.

(via Violet Blue)

Strange Sisters lesbian BDSM pulp

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Jan 192011
 

Strange Sisters has a gallery of vintage lesbian pulp novel covers with BDSM themes from decades past.

Most of them seem to depict lesbianism as a form of sadistic predation of the dominant, often masculinized woman upon the “confused” woman. Others create a triangular composition of helpless male observer, aggressive female and victim female. The male observer seems to vacillate between delighted voyeur and underdog hero. Some of the images also incorporate elements of the occult, too, with burning braziers or strange idols, and cover blurbs that mention “cults”.

Extreme pornography prosecutions in the UK

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Jan 112011
 

Pandora Blake’s LJ has a list of cases of people prosecuted over the UK’s new “extreme pornography” law.

This suggests that our fears about the consequences of the extreme porn legislation are being borne out. It’s no longer about protecting the people involved in making the images, but about policing our fantasies. Never mind that no causal connection can be demonstrated between viewing pornography and sexual violent crime (in fact it’s arguable that access to pornography helps prevent violent crime by giving people with socially ‘unacceptable’ desires an outlet for their fantasies), nor that it is perfectly possible to create ethical images of violent acts using consenting actors. Under this way of thinking, even illustrations and cartoons are too dangerous. This isn’t about regulating the porn industry, it’s about personal taste masquerading as morality. The prosecution in this case explicitly uses the Victorian concept of the “decency of society” as an excuse for censorship.

What price virginity in 2011?

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Jan 112011
 

From Xbiz, via Warren Ellis’ Twitter feed:

Kink.com will stream the deflowering of young virgin Nikki Blue in a ritualistic ceremony live on the Internet on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m.

The ceremony will be held on The Upper Floor of Kink.com’s headquarters, the San Francisco Armory. Prior to the event, a trained expert will insert Kink.com’s official hymen-cam to validate that Blue’s hymen is still in place and that she is a true virgin. Once her hymen is confirmed, the evening will proceed, the company said.

“We will start the evening by tightly binding Ms. Blue and introducing three Kink.com legends: Mark Davis, Jack Hammer and James Deen,” said Kink.com director John Paul “The Pope.” “Fans will vote for which of them will take Nikki’s virginity. Once the voting is complete, we will move to the sanctum, which will be dressed as a ritualistic chamber with candles and ceremonial tools. She’ll be placed in the circle and the winner selected by fans will deflower her. The other two will then join the ceremony and make her airtight.”

Whats surprises me about this is just how retrograde this seems. Virginity in 2011 just isn’t what it used to be. After the invention of condoms and antibiotics, it isn’t a magic talisman against sexually transmitted diseases. Virginity doesn’t have the social weight it used to either. Few people in North America expect a woman to be “virgo intacta” at the altar anymore, or to display a blood-stained bedsheet the morning after her wedding night. 18th century libertines fetishized virginity because its removal in a socially unapproved manner (e.g. rape or “seduction”) had such huge social ramifications for the woman. Apart from the direct violation of a person’s integrity, it would also result in social ostracism. (Assuming she wasn’t of low social standing, in which case society didn’t give a crap.)

In Clarissa, Lovelace spends most of the book trying by seduction and deception to get Clarissa to give up her virginity willingly, suggesting that he still puts a social value on it, despite his libertine views. Eventually, he just gives up, drugs her unconscious and rapes her, marking him as both a failed seducer and a coward. When she comes to, finally disillusioned about him, he offers to marry her to wipe away his crime and save her from social death, but she refuses.

Fast forward about 250 years, and watch the “Like a Virgin” number on the TV show Glee, in which three different people are moving towards their first full-on sexual encounter. They are not motivated by internal lust or passion for another so much as a desire to change their social status by removing the status of virgin, which they view as a stigma. In this case, they want and need others in their community to know that they have completed sex and are no longer virgins, completing their initiations into normative adulthood. Again, the social implications of virginity and non-virginity outweigh the physiological implications.

The existence of Girls Gone Wild and Barely Legal-type porn suggests there is still a fetishization of virginity, but I think this is more of a fascination with youth and freshness. It isn’t fascinated with the almost-magical instant of transition between two binary states, virgin and non-virgin, which seems to be driving this particular scenario.

The second thing that seems just odd is the definition of virginity implied in the press release. Kink.com seems to assume that virginity is not a social or psychological phenomenon, but an empirically verifiable physiological state. In other words, what they are really showing is the presence and then absence of a small scrap of human flesh, via heterosexual coitus. Big whoop. By that definition, a lesbian woman who has never had heterosexual intercourse would be a virgin her entire life, even if her first girlfriend got rid of that pesky hymen ages ago. In fact, a woman can have a non-intact hymen for any number of reasons, sexual or not. If we sign up for the pay per view, do we get a notarized affidavit of virginity after confirmation by the “trained expert”? (And who is this expert anyway? A gynecologist? Annie Sprinkle?)

I have no idea what Miss Blue’s sexual history is. It quite likely that she is hardly sexually inexperienced, and thus is a “technical virgin” only. This particular scenario may earn her a sentence or two in the history of porn, but it won’t significantly change her social status. The sign (the intact hymen) is de-coupled than the signifier (the woman’s sexual status). When the press release uses language like “sacrificing Nikki’s innocence”, it’s speaking in an obsolete language. We don’t believe in it anymore, in the same way we’re not impressed by a white woman with an Afro representing a lost tribe of beauties.

If I’m coming across as callous to Miss Blue, it isn’t intentional. I’m much less concerned about the state of her hymen, and whether it is breached in the right or wrong way, than whether it will be good for a rookie adult film performer to be dropped into the deep end. That this will be a live show, where they are discouraged from stopping and renegotiating if something goes wrong, is even more of a concern. As we saw in that excruciating scene in Graphic Sexual Horror, live shoots can create a situation in which everybody, including the models, wants to press on instead of stopping and making sure everybody’s okay with what’s happening. Nikki Blue’s first time (however you define that) doesn’t have to be hearts and flowers and soft music, but I would rather it didn’t go haywire for her.

That said, I don’t know how this can be anything beyond an ordinary video shoot. Linda Williams in her book Hard Core says that pornography evolved a complex visual language to represent what could not be represented: women’s subjective experience of sexual arousal and orgasm. What Kink.com is doing is attempting to visually represent what exists only as physiology, and has nothing to do with the social status or subjective experience of anyone involved. There’s nothing to see.

Addendum: Clarisse Thorn has a couple of good posts (1,2) on this.

Miss Maggie Mayhem has a good discussion of what “virginity” actually means.

Also, there are rumours going around that Nikki Blue is not actually a virgin. The deception!

Pedal to the metal, baby!

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Dec 312010
 

io9 has a post on the 1960 case history of a man whose kink was to be run over by a woman driving a car.

Some perversions, while representing formidable psychopathology, are also tributes to the complexity of the human mind and unconscious ego mechanisms. The patient, a man in his late twenties, reported a periodic desire to be injured by a woman operating an automobile. This wish, present since adolescence, he had by dint of great ingenuity and effort, gratified hundreds of times without serious injury or detection.

…

Satisfaction could be obtained by inhaling exhaust fumes, having a limb run over on a yielding surface to avoid appreciable damage or by being pressed against the wall by a vehicle. Gratification was enhanced if the woman were attractive by conventional standards. Injuries inflicted by men operating automobiles or other types of injury inflicted by women had no meaning.

This is an interesting counterpart to the fetish of men observing women pumping car gas pedals, “powerful, violent woman with a car” versus “helpless, impotent woman with a car”. It could probably be connected to the foot/trample/giantess cluster of fetishes, i.e. of being physically overpowered by a large, feminine thing. I also think of the scene in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), in which Varla attempts to crush the Vegetable with her car, and I strongly suspect the patient knew of that movie later in life.

How the slave girl became white

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Dec 302010
 

Martin, Charles D. The While African American Body. Amazon

There’s a “missing link” I still need to find, the historical point at which people started thinking about white people as slaves. I found it, or one point of it, in the eroticized parodies of mid-19th century slave narratives published in the late 19th century. I still need to find more evidence to strengthen this point, where black shades into white.

Martin’s book explores this strange borderland between the races. Europeans were fascinated by “white negroes” or “leopard children” in scientific or entertainment venues, which could be Africans with conditions like albinism or vitiligo, or Africans in partial or total whiteface, or white people with partial blackface. The separation of the sign (“white skin”) from the signified (the social construction of “whiteness”) was both fascinating and terrifying, particularly to new American immigrants who were not secure in their “whiteness”.

Continue reading »

Torrid Zones: the mapping of sexuality onto geography

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Dec 302010
 

Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones.

Lee, Debbie.  Slavery and the Romantic Imagination.

Richard Burton postulated the “Sotadic zone”, in which male-male sexuality was normal and accepted south of certain latitudes. This equation of sexuality and geography was a common subtext of 18th and 19th century discourses, and still prevalent today. Sexuality was equated with other cultural traits, such as sloth versus industry, reason versus emotion, and these traits were equated with particular geographical regions. (Nussbaum, Pg. 8-9) “Androgynous, transgressive, ‘monstrous,’ lesbian, and working-class women – indigenous and colonizing women – are all linked metaphorically to bawdy women and are located on the fringes of respectability akin to brute savagery.” (Nussbaum, pg. 10)

It wasn’t only men who “exploited” the imaginative space of the Orient for sexual purposes. Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) imitates the Turkish slave women she sees on her Grand Tour in her dress and dancing, gaining power and agency via performing as “England’s caricature of the Turkish harem woman” (Nussbaum, Pg. 35) at masquerades. Likewise, Lady Montagu’s description of Turkish baths had a strong frisson of lesbianism. (Nussbaum, pg. 139)

Our modern conceptions of normal gender and sexuality were still being sorted out at this point in Western history. Homoerotic relationships between women were seen as part of initiating women into sexuality with the eventual goal of heterosexuality and marriage. “Same-sex desire, initiation into heterosexuality through homosexuality, or bisexual activity [in women] did not fix sexual identity but instead influenced public opinion of a woman’s character that was itself defined by the visible–that is, by cross-dressing or by publicly acceptable intimacy between women.” (Nussbaum, Pg. 147) (Cf. the Brittany-Santana relationship in Glee. Kurt goes through agony because of self-identification as gay despite a lack of actual sexual experience, while Brittany and Santana freely screw around but maintain their performance of normative gender as cheerleaders)

Another way people related to the African or Oriental slave was by acts of imagination, notably for our purposes in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) (Lee, pg. 34) He cites the example of imagining ourselves into a suffering slave on the rack, feeling his bodily experience.

Could the true experience of suffering be conveyed to the person who had not literally suffered so? Or did it only fall into stereotype?

Abolitionist poems relied so heavily on stereotypes that it is impossible to imagine the movement without the standard register of diseased ships, growling captains, clamoring crews, greedy planters, lush tropical isles, shackled slave men, and dejected slave women grabbing after their children. Although these images all had some basis in reality, writers invoked this cliched catalog for some specific reasons. Like dinnerware and sugar bowls, stereotypes existed through duplication and thrived through mass consumption. The etymology of the word stereotype, in fact, refers to the printing plate used to reproduce many copies of the same material, and therefore emphasizes how abolitionist poets who employed the slave mother stereotype were in the business of sentimental reproduction.

Lee, pg. 212

You could also apply that to pornography, mass production of familiar types. Mary Prince’s slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831), describes her beating in great detail (Lee, Pg.215), but she also stops several times in her narrative to say her suffering is “too, too bad to speak in England” (Lee, Pg. 216). This recalls Harriet Jacobs’ difficulty getting her own un-expurgated slave narrative published a few decades later. Prince (who dictated her story that was transcribed and edited by others for abolitionist purposes) keeps “intruding” into her own story, reminding the reader of the actual person who experienced this and preventing the usual free flow of identification between author and text.

Midori on Japanese BDSM slang

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Dec 202010
 

Fetish Diva Midori enlightens us with a brief lexicon of Japanese sexual slang, with the caveat that “Japanese slang changes at a pace that would leave the hippest American gasping for words not yet invented.” Samples:

Esu Emu SM — SM. Yes that’s the actual word used for sadomasochism in Japan. Before dead white guys in 19th Century Europe decided to make a separate category, folks didn’t have a name for the odd stuff that some folks did behind closed doors.

Goshujinsama or Uesama — Male dominant. This one is pretty tricky. Direct translation from the common English use of “Master” to mean “male dominant” really isn’t applicable in Japan. Men who top in Japan don’t use a self-appointed title. They don’t insist on others calling them any special names. The term “goshujinsama” is sometimes met with a snicker as it literally means “Husband” in the high honorific form. “Uesama” is a gender-neutral term used in feudal Japan for the highest ranking of that clan. When Americans ask for the translation for “Master”, they’re likely to get some hemming and hawing or a quick brush-off with the word “Goshujinsama.”

Jo oh sama — Dominant woman (Literal meaning: Queen). Often used for professional dominants but not limited to the pros.

Midori’s post highlights that language influences social categories, and how it can be misleading to directly map one language’s word-concept onto another. For instance, among North American English-speakers, “femme” connotes a particular sexual and gender identity (i.e. a feminine-gendered lesbian woman). In French, however, it just denotes “woman.” Do Francophones and other non-English speakers have their own word that connotes that gender-sexual identity, or is there a separate set of identity categories?

When I try to get a grip on the divergent/parallel evolution of BDSM in Japan, I feel like I hit a brick wall. The primary sources are located far away and furthermore are in a language I don’t understand. I also get the strong impression that the Japanese in general don’t like to discuss this sort of thing with outsiders. What does get out is highly suspect, often more the product of Westerners’ Orientalist fantasies than sober observation. This is why I am so hesitant to theorize about Japanese BDSM now or in the past.

Glenn Marcus’ forced labor conviction affirmed

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Dec 082010
 

The United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit has made a decision about the Glenn Marcus case:

For the reasons set forth below, we affirm Marcus’s forced labor conviction and vacate his sex trafficking conviction. The case is remanded to the district court for proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Most of the decision involves various legal points that I only vaguely follow (the closest I’ve ever had to legal training is watching lots of Law & Order reruns), but I noted that the court says on several occasions that Marcus’ relationship with Jodi “became nonconsensual”, meaning that it was consensual at some point. This means that the court is judging the Marcus-Jodi relationship in terms of the consent or lack thereof between them, rather than looking at the particular activities they performed.

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